personal finance

Intuit, whose Quicken package has pretty much cornered the market for financial software, has now picked up one of the few applications that could challenge its dominance: Mint.com.

Faced with a deadline to upgrade my old version of Quicken, I briefly considered Intuit's Quicken Online option - and discarded it. 

Sure, I wouldn't have to worry about backups if I give my data to the cloud, but I have 15 years of data in Quicken that documents every item I've purchased and every investment I've made during that time.  The damage that would be caused from a breach of that data would be so potentially damaging to me personally that the risk of compromise -- however small - just isn't worth it.

The warning was shockingly clear: Upgrade now or "you will no longer be able to access... Downloads of your bank, credit card, credit union, or investment account transactions."

I had just received this message within Quicken 2006. It came in a pop-up alert box from Intuit, and it gave me a deadline. The download feature would be shut off for all users of Quicken 2006 as of April 30th. But I could avoid this fate by upgrading to Quicken 2009. Buy now.

Did Quicken prices double? They certainly appeared to if you were a user of Quicken Basic and wanted to upgrade to the latest version, as I discovered this week.

I paid $29.99 for Quicken Basic a few years ago. That simple version is gone, replaced by the $29.99 Quicken Starter Edition, which appears to have pretty much the same features.